Embodiments of the present invention relate to vehicular accident analysis and specifically to the collection and analysis of information for using the principles of photogrammetry to estimate vehicle damage and impact severity.
Organizations such as insurance companies and others are tasked with investigating accidents to resolve property and injury claims. Part of the investigation is to determine the severity and direction of the impact. A review of repair estimates and photos is usually done to develop a qualitative assessment of impact severity. If there is damage beyond the bumper of the vehicle(s) (i.e., there is crush damage to the vehicle), the vehicle is often given the qualitative assessment of a significant impact based on a subjective review of the damage information. As much as 40% of accidents of a low severity are subjectively analyzed as a high severity impact, primarily because of the damage to the vehicle(s).
One solution to determining crush damage is to measure the crush when the vehicle is examined for damage and use that information to determine impact severity. The measurement of crush requires some training to understand the concepts and insure consistency, and is also time consuming. With high turnover in the insurance industry and a desire to improve operational efficiency, this creates an ongoing and potentially expensive effort.
Alternately, organizations can retain forensic experts such as engineers and accident reconstructionists to evaluate accident information, reconstruct the accident scenario and characteristics including the determination of the magnitude and direction of the impact. This is an expensive and non-timely solution to be used on wide-scale basis.
The current solution for determining the components and operations required to fix a damaged vehicle is to visually inspect the vehicle. A list of components is created identifying which should be repaired or replaced. This visual inspection process frequently requires a second or more inspection to correct errors in the first inspection. This is a labor intensive and inefficient process. The current process does not leverage the information from similar impacts to similar vehicles.
The Principal Direction of Force (PDOF) is the main axis along which the force of the impact acts on the vehicle. The PDOF is a factor in both the determining of injury potential of the accident and determining which components of the vehicle are damaged. The current method of determining PDOF is to examine photos, descriptions of the accident and possibly scene information to determine the final resting locations of the vehicles. In low to moderate severity impacts, the final resting locations of the vehicles are either not particularly relevant or not available. The current evaluation of PDOF is done by forensic experts which is an expensive and time consuming process.